Tainan: Taiwan's 4th City (1st Capital)

Wikipedia informs me that Tainan is actually a sister city to Monterey. Probably could have got some free tea or something, had I known. Considerably less expensive than Taipei, which is no surprise. My hotel room didn't have any windows, I considered complaining for about 3 minutes, which was how long it took for someone to set off some fireworks outside that came through as only a muffed roar. On second thought, the hospitality was A-OK:

Stirring sticks, a condom, several kinds of tea, and-- a-ha!-- business cards. "Happy Time for You !" indeed. Business cards are essential, because if you wander out and lose your way, you'll look long and hard for anyone whose English is good enough to help you find your way back to the "Hwa Mao Business Hotel." The maps in my guide book were very good, but only the big avenues were on them-- wouldn't have made a difference anyway, because the smaller streets didn't have any signs in pinyin. Always have a business card from your hotel!

So, I can't really tie this into a narrative, here were some interesting things I saw and happened to take pictures of in Tainan. Later I'll post separately about an incredible festival-type-thing I stumbled upon, and my "tourist destination" in Tainan, the old Anping fort.



1) That is most definitely not a cat. It looks a lot like a cat, but it is not a cat. What it is, I don't know. Could it be some variety of civet? Anyway, terribly exciting, all the good things this trip had to offer + bonus cryptozoology!

2) This is something you should all be familiar with, its a robotic version of a carnival game. This was on the street outside the train station. The thing that made me take a picture, though, was not the Hello Kitty doll, but the price tag. NT$200 was, at the time I was traveling, equivalent to more than 6 USD. Now, I like Hello Kitty as much as the next guy (let's just leave it at that), but nothing in that glass box is worth 6 dollars.

3) A blank strip of sidewalk, about 15 meters long, with one of these at each end. What are they for?

4) I haven't talked much about the moped thing, because I didn't get good photos of the phenomenon. But in almost any city block, they outnumber cars at least 3 to 1. This is a moped-only filling station. Unless it's something else, I didn't stand around and wait for a moped to stop.

5) Well, I've read the English, and the Latin, and I'm clueless, so perhaps the key must be in the Chinese.

And Finally: Hey, Popcorn!

Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial

Or is it the Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall? The name of this place is a subject of some controversy. Anyway, this is a noteworthy item because it is the largest thing in Taiwan besides Taipei 101. Taipei 101 is an economic monument, appropriate because Taiwan does have a giant economy. But the political monuments in Taiwan tend to be small, and the reason this one is an exception is because Gen. Chiang considered himself the legitimate ruler of all China.

But if the renaming faction wants to dissociate this imposing structure from the legacy of Generalissimo Chiang, they have a lot of work to do:


The whimsical decorations you see in this picture are actually part of that process, which has at various points progressed pretty far actually:


The words on the hat read "Greatest Man in the World Ever," and are meant satirically.

Night markets, and chicken parts

So, any discussion of tourism in Taiwan will not take long to arrive at Night Markets, which are fascinating for Americans, who aren't used to thinking of the streets as any place to be after dark. ("Whole families shopping at night!" is an indoor scene). Now, night markets can mean two different things. The first is large warehouses, like the one below, filled with stalls selling what-have-you, which are open at night (whether they are open during the day I don't know I didn't go to Burger King). Here's one now, this is the Shilin night market in NW Taipei:

But if you leave Taiwan thinking this is what night markets are (hard to do but I nearly did it by accident), you are missing the real treat. The real Night Market is a shopping district of the city where all the stores are open, in fact about 75% more open than during the day, and pushcarts of every description crowd every open space for block after block after block after block. No pictures of this phenomenon, again that pesky thing that all space above the ground level in Taiwan seems to be residential. I asked someone about it and he said, "Well, at this point, pretty much all of Taipei is a night market," idea being-- whole families shopping at night!
The other idea of the night market is to eat while you shop. Which is an occasion for another picture.

My criteria for street food are these:
1) Food must be cooked after I order it.
2) I must be able to see the food prepared.
3) Food must smell like food.
The real problem turns out not to be (1) or (2), but (3). Basically, any stall (or stall nearby a stall) that is selling tofu or meat balls will have a stench that means, "OK, I'm not actually hungry." That was how I was driven through 6 blocks of vendors to the table pictured. I stood there long enough to figure out what was going on, and decided I needed a picture, and decided I would feel better about taking a picture if I bought something, and decided I was hungry, because this place actually met all of (1-3). Basically, you make a pile of the meat you want in a bowl and select one of four treatments (don't ask me, I guessed), and they roast it up (again), season it, chop it up, and place it in a bag for you. So I got a chicken leg quarter and a skewer of tofu, and a nice picture, and went away happy.
Now, the thing about the picture is the relative amount of table space given to the various pieces. Leg quarters and feet getting equal space is arguably fair; after all, the chicken has two of each. But why, then, do the hearts, livers, and necks get the same space? Inscrutably Chinese.

Taipei 101: Tall Buildings Do Not Photograph Well

Taipei 101 is, for now, the tallest building in the world. In the 21st century, buildings don't get to be world's tallest for long. Indeed, the designation is fraught with technicalities, and always has been.

From above, blurry pictures of Taipei look like blurry pictures of any metropolis, so I'll spare you most of them. These two views communicate the important things:

1) At the top of Taipei 101 (actually the 88th of 101 floors), you are indeed in the clouds.

2) I know now the inspiration of the sculpture outside the ceramics museum at Yingge.

The Top: Lulin

Lulin Mountain Observatory isn't the highest point in Taiwan, but you can see it from there! From Alishan, this meant another bus ride, followed by a stirring climb for the final 100m-- straight up. Here's the view from the climb, and at the top:

Alishan: Not Just Trees

I figured that previous post was better off with nothing but scenery and the odd graffiti at the end, but I do have some pictures from Alishan which are more than just trees, and so here they are:
I didn't say I knew what they were, just that they were not trees.
It is a "lumber collector," a description that leaves me profoundly unsatisfied. Anybody?
This one I can do. It is a shrine, with a bell.
This, one of quite a few in the Alishan Forest Scenic Area, is a tree under repair. Apparently, this sort of tree repair is quite expensive. My question, then and now, is: "Do I still have to pay if it doesn't work?"
This could be an amazingly cute little bonsai mountain diorama, but alas, it is just a stump. A scenic stump, though.

Alishan in the morning

We climbed up at 4:30 in the morning, hoping in vain to see the sunrise over Jade Peak. We would in fact see the sun that day, but not for several hours after sunrise. Still, lots of very beautiful scenery, even in the fog. One captionable picture:

The silly plastic bags they gave us to wear, which made us all wet from the inside out and which we (I) wore because I didn't have a spare pair of pants, look totally awesome in photographs! Thanks, thoughtful Taiwanese garbage-bag-providing hosts!
Anyway, without (much) further comment, here's some scenery:

Alishan Forest Recreation Area

The Alishan Forest Railway has a very interesting path, involving several backtracks, i.e., the train proceeds to a dead end in some very scenic corner of the hillside, then backs up and switches tracks to go up to another dead end, etc. Neat-o, but not easy to capture photographically. So, what do you suppose we get to see at the top?

If you answered, "a 7-11," you are right, however, the correct answer is, "I see we have farther to climb." Tomorrow.

Chungli to Alishan

Alright! It's Wednesday, 16 January! The Chungli/National Central University part of the meeting is over, and it's off to the mountains via High Speed Rail! When you are inside the cars you won't think you are in a 21st-century conveyance, but after you traverse the island from top to bottom in under 3 hours, you'll know. It's Fast.

We only went halfway down the island, but it certainly felt a little more tropical when we arrived:

Of course, we then immediately started to climb (in a bus). After we had climbed a lot, we were in the tea-growing region. Amazingly, I don't have a single photo of a tea farm, but we were inside a bus the whole time, on a very curvy road-- you know, the kind they put up mirrors in the curves:

When we stopped again, we were above the tea-growing areas, heading into the seriously scenic part of our trip. Scenic like this:


Walking up a little trail outside Fencihu, we noticed an interesting piece of infrastructure: a "wooden horse" track:

Now, I feel like this just has to be a play on "iron horse", but since there are three languages in play in that trope, it's somewhere between unlikely and unknowable. Basically, this was a track laid down to facilitate the movement of sledges carrying goods up and down the mountain. Much labor-saving, and no complicated wheel-making!
Anyway, now that we've stopped in Fencihu, it's time to catch (again) the train. Here it comes, the Alishan Forest Railway!